"I don't ask for much - I'm a man with simple needs,"
Anders Osborne sang Friday afternoon on the Gentilly Stage at New Orleans
Jazz Fest 2013. Simple needs? Ha! I'm calling him on that. There's nothing at all
simple about what this guy does, musically at least. Except for one thing:
going straight to the gut.

This New Orleans-based artist, who wields a slide
guitar with the precision of a surgeon and the ardor of a lover gone over the
precipice of commitment, played as solid an hour's worth of material as any
sane listener could desire. Possessing a voice that rises out of the darkness
to the light of a soulful, tremulous wail, he is quite the showman. No, wait.
More like a consummate shaman, bending successive moments to suit his majestic
purposes.

I'm using the word "majestic" deliberately. Osborne
seeks an epic quality to much of his music, crafting layer upon layer of hugely scaled
soundscapes. His acknowledgments to classic Southern rock are evident, yet his
aesthetic methodology is never lazily derivative. Every slashing guitar figure,
every cry of a lyric, seems to come to from an authentic place.

Anders Osborne plays on the Gentilly Stage at the New Orleans and Festival on Friday, April 26, 2013. Chris Granger, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune

Osborne's albums, including "American Patchwork" and
his most recent effort, "Three Free Amigos," provided an ample sampling of his style.
"On the Road to Charlie Parker," from the former, was an extended, rich and
more than occasionally glorious narrative of triumph and despair. The sordid
aspects of living concern Osborne, but tellingly, do not consume him.

So it is we find the title track of "Three Free
Amigos," which manages to be both amiable and a mildly subversive. Osborne can
also be playful ("I Almost Cut My Hair") or a bit self-mocking (witness a lyric
that defines personal paranoia as "like looking into the mirror and seeing a
police car").

Partnered by a superlative group of colleagues
(guitarist Luther Dickinson among them), Osborne drained himself, and his
listeners, to something approaching grateful exhaustion. "Man, that's rock and
roll," one 20-something fellow behind me cried out when it was all over, marveling
at Osborne's guitar chops. "Man, he just plays that thing."